Waste Of Time, Talent: Cole Story, `Runaway'

TELEVISION

Pity the filmmakers who can't decide what they're doing. They can fritter away promising stories and good casts.

So it goes tonight with two perplexing movies. CBS' The Runaway makes you wonder where its diffused plot is headed.

NBC's Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story ruins a wrenching drama with a screwy setup. It's a biography-lecture in which Cole repeatedly interrupts the action, addresses the camera and comments on what's happening.

When the actress playing Cole tries heroin, the scene goes to a freeze frame and the Grammy-winning singer appears to say, "I've just always been a curious, reckless, stupid little girl. And I just decided that I wanted to try it.'' Then the action resumes.

This weird device prevents the movie from building a mood and cheapens the production. Livin' for Love, which airs at 9 tonight on WESH-Channel 2, often looks like the cheesy re-enactments in reality series.

The movie has things that should work: Cole's loving relationship with father Nat King Cole, samples of both singers' music, her dramatic struggles with heroin and cocaine. The film is based on Cole's autobiography, Angel on My Shoulder, which she wrote with Digby Diehl.

But director Robert Townsend and writer Cindy Myers mishandle the assets. Cole's narration needed to be sharpened and used sparingly.

As Nat, James McDaniel of NYPD Blue is seriously miscast and badly coiffed. He appears briefly and coughs several times to signal the singer's demise.

Nat's death presented long-term problems for the family. "When we buried my father, we each took that grief and stuffed it into a little closet, deep, way deep inside and locked the door,'' Natalie says. "Somehow we expected it to stay put.''

Diahann Carroll is suitably chilly as Natalie's negative, uptight mother, Maria, who complains, "One singer in this family is enough.'' It takes a long time for mom to wise up.

Four actresses share the Natalie role. Theresa Randle gives a vivid performance during Natalie's troubled years from 1970 to 1984 and lip-syncs to Cole's recordings.

Randle hands off the role to the real Natalie, who is fine. But it's an eerie assignment: Cole has to re-enact the moment she told her son his father had died.

And Cole upstages her acting with her on-camera commentary. "In a split second, my marriage was over, but that's addiction,'' Cole says. "You see, it overwhelms every sane idea and impulse that you've ever had.''

Livin' for Love needed a harder-hitting style, one that favored show over tell. The movie glosses over Cole's time in rehab, and Natalie steps in to explain her therapy and pain.

The soundtrack includes such Cole favorites as "I Can't Say No,'' "This Will Be'' (she initially disliked the lyrics), "Our Love'' and "Unforgettable,'' which concludes the story in professional triumph. She had to fight record executives to record her father's music before reaching Grammy glory.

The movie should have been unforgettable, but it's hackneyed and superficial. The big finale looks like a poorly conceived music video.

`THE RUNAWAY'

The 207th offering from the Hallmark Hall of Fame has Maya Angelou acting, former Superman Dean Cain enforcing the law, and characters struggling against racism.

Unfortunately, The Runaway also has a runaway plot. The CBS movie airs at 9 tonight on WKMG-Channel 6.

The leisurely paced film, set in 1940s Georgia, starts as a boy's adventure, then it turns into a murder mystery, a love story, a message film, a crime drama and a legal thriller. It's To Kill a Mockingbird meets Touched by an Angel.

The sheriff (Cain) tries to solve the killings years before of three black men, and he grows closer to a reticent young widow (Kathryn Erbe).

The community harbors awful secrets of racism, abuse and terror that culminate in a big trial. The strange Conjure Woman (Angelou) adds a mystical touch and pleads for social change.

The movie is based on a novel by Terry Kay, whose To Dance With the White Dog became an outstanding Hallmark offering. The Runaway has too many elements, and director Arthur Allan Seidelman and writer Ron Raley have trouble juggling them all.

The movie lacks energy except when De Young and Hart are on screen. The script hands undeveloped roles to Angelou, Morgan and Pat Hingle as a shrewd lawyer.

Still, The Runaway has a haunting quality for its views on race. A sad feeling hangs over the film too: The chance for a first-rate movie was lost.